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A Lurker's History of Paradox and the Paradox Community *
by Stacy Rowley

[Editor's Note: All the graphics in this article (except the two icons) are links to a larger version of the same image. Placing your mouse pointer over the graphic will show popup and status bar info about what the photograph is. The larger images open in the same smaller dialog window, so you might wish to leave that window open while reading the article.]


The Late DOS Days: the Software

While Paradox for Windows was on the drawing board, Paradox for DOS had Windows-like dialog boxes and event handling added in its August 1992 release of 4.0. This was new user interface, based on Turbo Vision, Borland's standard character-based windowing interface. The Intel 286 was now the minimum platform with DOS protected mode operation in a minimum of 2 MB. Applications designed in Paradox 3.5 could still be run directly in 4.0. Memo and binary data types were added, along with secondary index views and a multitude of programming improvements. By April 1993, 4.02 was released. By September 1993, Paradox 4.5, the last of the DOS versions, was released. It included an expanded debugger system and more PAL commands.


The Late DOS Days: the People (the Community)

Not too much time had passed and the people were largely the same. Dan Paolini, Dickford Cohn, and Karen Ciocchi were prolific in answering questions on BORDB. Also very active was Brian Bushay, one of the first participants on the CompuServe forum. Brian became part of TeamB around 1991 and began to spend several hours a day responding to questions also, which he continued to do for many years. To this day, he is still there to supply answers.

Steve Green started working with Paradox about 1986, and now became very active on the forum and newsgroups, becoming a member of TeamB and then CTech. In fact, in recent years Corel turned over support for Paradox DOS to Steve's company.


The Late DOS Days: the People (the product add-ins)

WaitPlus was upgraded by Alan Zenreich with Andy Appell.
Paint Pal Ted Rosenberger at Target Software came out with several versions of Paint Pal, a program that facilitated developing dialog windows and the PAL code used to control the windows. Sheng Labs came out with a Paradox compiler (to generate an .exe file) called BestPAL, but the software wasn't ready. In late 1994, with it still not functioning fully, Target Software acquired the product, now named TurboPAL, and gave it a big try. Although many kinks were ironed out, TurboPal still fell short. For all the effort expended, the yield was little.

Paradox Programmer's Guide: PAL by Example Alan Zenreich and Jim Kocis followed up by a second mammoth undertaking for a Paradox 4.0 edition of Paradox Programmer's Guide: PAL by Example.
Paradox Queries books Dan Ehrmann produced his first query books, Paradox Queries: The Basics and Paradox Queries: A Developer's Reference, which were a welcome information source. Greg Salcedo and Martin Rudy followed up with Paradox 4 Power Programming Secrets. Dan Paolini became an active trainer.


Next:
The Early Windows Days: the software


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